The Black Book (48 page)

He opened the window, leaned into the darkness and, his elbows on the window ledge, pushed his face into the bottomless well of the air shaft: a bad odor rose up, the smell of pigeon droppings that had been accumulating over half a century, of all the crap that had been tossed down, of the building’s grime, of smog, mud, tar, and hopelessness. They’d thrown down here all the things they’d wanted to forget. He had an impulse to jump into the void from which there was no return, into the recollections that had disappeared without a trace from the memories of those who’d once lived here, into the darkness that Jelal had patiently built up in his writing over the years, weaving into it, as in the elaborations of the old courtly poetry, the motifs of wells, mystery, and fear. But he merely stared into the darkness like a drunk trying to remember. The recollections of the childhood he and Rüya had spent together in this apartment building were closely related to this smell; the innocent kid that he had once been, the well-meaning young man, the husband content with his wife, and the ordinary citizen who lived at the edge of mystery were also created by this smell. The desire to be with Jelal and Rüya arose so powerfully inside him that he felt like crying out; it was as if half his body had been ripped from him and taken away to some distant and dark place, as in a dream, and if only he could raise a hue and cry he’d escape from this trap. But he merely stared into the bottomless dark, feeling on his face the damp cold of the winter night and snow. So long as he exposed his face to the dry well of darkness, he sensed that the pain he’d been carrying around alone all these days was being shared, that what was terrifying had become comprehensible, and what he would later come to call the mystery of defeat, misery, and ruin had become manifest like Jelal’s life, the details of which Jelal had prepared long ago like a bait to pull Galip into this trap. There, hanging out the window, he gazed down into the bottomless well for a long time. It was much later, when he became sharply aware of the raw cold on his face, neck, and forehead, that he pulled himself in and closed the window.

What followed was unobstructed, comprehensible, and illuminated. Going from the hallway into the living room, he sank into one of the easy chairs and rested. Then he straightened up Jelal’s desk, replaced the papers, news clippings, and photographs in their boxes and put the boxes back in the cabinet. He picked up not only the mess he’d made in the last couple of days but also the clutter that Jelal had sloppily tossed around the place. He emptied the ashtrays, washed the glassware and cups, cracked the windows open, and aired out the apartment. He washed his face, made himself another cup of strong coffee, placed Jelal’s heavy old Remington on the desk he’d already cleared and tidied, and sat down. The copy paper that Jelal always used was in the desk drawer; taking out a sheet, he stuck it into the machine and immediately began writing.

Later on, when Galip recalled what he had accomplished by daybreak, not only would he find everything he had done logical, necessary, and appropriate but he’d also remember the clarity and precision with which he’d acted. He wrote for almost two hours without getting up. Feeling that everything had now fallen into place, he wrote with an excitement that the clean, blank pages produced in him. Every time he hit the keys of the typewriter, which moved in concert with an old and familiar piece of music in his head, he realized that he had known and contemplated what he was writing a long time ago. He had to slow down once in a while and momentarily think of the right word, but he wrote with the flow of the sentences and thoughts—as Jelal put it, “without being forced.”

He began the first piece with the sentence, “I looked in the mirror and read my face.” The second: “I dreamed that I had finally become the person I wanted to be all these years”; and in the third, he narrated old Beyoğlu stories. He wrote effortlessly after the first one and with a sorrow and hope that was even more profound. He was confident that his pieces would settle into Jelal’s column exactly as he wished and anticipated. He signed the three pieces with Jelal’s own signature, which he had imitated thousands of times on the backs of his notebooks during his high-school years.

At daybreak, as the garbage truck went by with the clang of cans getting banged on the sides, Galip examined Jelal’s picture in F. M. Üçüncü’s book. Since there was no identification under one of the indistinct, faded photographs on another page, he thought it must belong to the author himself. He read the autobiographical foreword carefully, and calculated the author’s age when he was implicated in the thwarted military coup in 1962. Considering that he was a lieutenant when he set off for Anatolia and that he had the opportunity to watch Hamit Kaplan’s initial years in wrestling, F. M. Üçüncü had to be close to Jelal’s age. Once more, Galip combed through the ’44 and ’45 graduates in the War College yearbooks. He came across several faces that could belong to the unidentified face in
Mystery of Letters and Loss of Mystery
as a young man, but the most salient feature in the faded photograph, baldness, had been hidden under a military hat in the yearbook photographs of the young cadets.

At eight-thirty, wearing his overcoat with the three columns folded up in the inside pocket, Galip emerged hastily out of the Heart-of-the-City Apartments like a hurried dad going to work and crossed the street to the other sidewalk. Either no one had seen him or else whoever had hadn’t bothered calling out to him. The air was clear and the sky winter blue; the sidewalks were covered with snow, ice, and mud. He stopped at the arcade where the barber who came by to shave Grandpa every morning had a barbershop called Venus, which he and Jelal used to patronize later on, and dropped off the keys to Jelal’s apartment at the locksmith’s shop located at the very end. He bought a copy of
Milliyet
at the news vendor’s on the corner. He went in the Milk Company pudding shop where Jelal used to breakfast some mornings and ordered potted eggs, cream, honey, and tea. While he had his breakfast reading Jelal’s column, he thought about the sleuths in Rüya’s mystery novels who must feel as he now felt when they were able to derive a significant hypothesis out of a bunch of clues. He felt like a detective who, having found a significant key to unlock the mystery, was now looking forward to opening new doors.

Jelal’s column was the last one he had seen in the
Milliyet
offices available for publication in the folder on Saturday and, like the others, it too had already been printed once before. Galip didn’t even attempt solving the secondary meanings of the letters. After breakfast, waiting in line for the
dolmuş,
he remembered the person he used to be and the life that person had led until recently: In the mornings, he used to read the newspaper on the
dolmuş,
thinking about returning home in the evening, and dreaming about his wife at home sleeping in their bed. Tears welled up in his eyes.

“As it turns out,” he thought to himself as the
dolmuş
went by the Dolmabahçe Palace, “the apprehension that one is someone else is all that one needs to believe that the world has changed from top to bottom.” What he saw out of the
dolmuş
window was not the Istanbul he’d known all along but another Istanbul whose mystery he had just cracked and would eventually set down on paper.

At the newspaper, the editor was in a meeting with the department heads. After tapping on the door and waiting briefly, Galip entered Jelal’s office. Nothing had changed on the desk or elsewhere in the room since Galip had last been here. He sat down at the desk and quickly rifled through the drawers. Old cocktail invitations to openings, bulletins sent by various left- and right-wing political factions, news clippings he’d seen the last time, buttons, the necktie, watch, empty ink bottles, pills, and a pair of dark glasses he hadn’t noticed before … He put the dark glasses on and left Jelal’s office. When he went into the newsroom, he saw the old polemicist Neşati working at the desk. The chair next to him was vacant, where the magazine writer had sat the last time. Galip walked over and sat down. “Do you remember me?” he asked the old man after a while.

“I do!” Neşati said without raising his head. “You are a flower in my garden of memory. ‘Memory is a garden.’ Whose words are those?”

“Jelal Salik’s.”

“Nope, they belong to Bottfolio,” said the old columnist, looking up. “As translated by Ibn Zerhani in his classical version. Jelal Salik pinched it from there as usual. Just as you’ve pinched his dark glasses.”

“Those are my glasses,” Galip said.

“Which goes to show that glasses, like people, are created in each other’s image. Give them here!”

Galip took off the glasses and handed them over. When the old man put on the dark glasses after inspecting them briefly, he resembled one of the legendary fifties Beyoğlu hoods Jelal had written about in his columns: the boss of the casino-cum-whorehouse-cum-nightclub who had vanished in his Cadillac. Smiling mysteriously, he turned to Galip.

“No wonder they say that you ought to look at the world through someone else’s eyes once in a while. Only then can you really comprehend the mystery of the world and mankind. Have you figured out who said that?”

“F. M. Üçüncü.”

“Not in the least,” said the old man. “He’s as stupid as they come. He’s one of those poor slobs. Where’d you come across his name?”

“Jelal once told me it was one of the pseudonyms he’d used for many years.”

“Goes to show that when a man grows really senile, not only does he deny his own past and work, he claims to be other people as well. But I can’t imagine our shrewd Mister Jelal getting that demented. He must’ve been up to something, lying out-and-out like that. F. M. Üçüncü happens to be a real-life person who exists flesh-and-blood. Twenty years ago he was an officer in the army who bombarded our offices with mail. When one or two of his letters were printed out of kindness in the reader-mail columns, he turned up at the offices swaggering as if he were on the regular staff. Then, suddenly, he quit showing up; he was nowhere to be seen for the next twenty years. Only a week ago, he turns up again, his head bald as a melon, tells me he’s a fan, saying that he came all the way to the paper just to see me. He was pitiful, carrying on about omens that were becoming manifest.”

“What omens?”

“Come, come, now. You know very well what omens. Or doesn’t Jelal clue you in? Time is ripe, don’t you know! All that crap about manifested omens! Out in the street: Day of Judgment, Revolution, Liberation of the East, etc.”

“The other day Jelal and I were talking about you in connection with that subject.”

“Where’s he hiding out?”

“Slips my mind.”

“They’re closeted in the editorial offices,” said the old columnist. “They’re going to give your Uncle Jelal the boot for not coming up with any new work. Tell him from me that they will offer his space in the second page to me, but I am going to turn it down.”

“Jelal brought your name up with affection the other day when he was talking about the military coup you both got implicated in during the early sixties.”

“All lies. He betrayed the coup, which is the reason why he hates me, and the rest of us,” said the old columnist in the dark glasses that didn’t seem out of place on him, who now looked more like a “maestro” than a Beyoğlu gangster. “He sold out the coup. Naturally, he wouldn’t tell you how it was, claiming instead that he was the one who organized everything. But, as usual, your Uncle Jelal joined in only when everyone began believing that it was going to be successful. Before that, while networks of readers were being organized from one end of Anatolia to the other, while pyramids, minarets, freemason symbols, Cyclopes, mysterious compasses, pictures of lizards, Seljuk domes, marked White Russian bank notes, wolves’ heads were being passed around, Jelal was collecting photographs of readers like children collect pictures of movie stars. One day he invented the house of mannequins, next he began blathering about an ‘eye’ that observed him on narrow streets in the dark of the night. We figured he wanted to join us, so we consented. We imagined he’d put his column at the service of the cause; maybe he could even attract some of the officers. Some attraction! Back then, there were a lot of crazies and freeloaders around, men of your F. M. Üçüncü’s ilk; first thing Jelal did was to put the headlock on them. Then, using ciphers, formulas, acrostics, he worked up a liaison with another shady bunch. After he got his fill of these liaisons he considered victories, he’d show up to haggle over what cabinet chair he fancied after the revolution. In order to increase his bargaining power, he insisted that he was in contact with the dregs of dervish orders, folks who awaited the Messiah, and people who said they got messages from Ottoman princes loafing around in either Portugal or France; he claimed that he received letters from phantom persons which he promised to show us, that the heirs of pashas and sheikhs who called on him at his place had left him manuscripts and testaments full of secrets, and that weird persons arrived at the newspaper in the middle of the night to see him. He invented all these persons himself. During that same time period, I attempted to burst this guy’s bubble who’d put out the word that he was slated to become the foreign minister after the revolution, when he didn’t even have any French to speak of. Back then, he was running a commentary about stories which he claimed were the testament of an obscure legendary personage, penning nonsense full of prophets, Messiahs, the Apocalypse, concerning a conspiracy which would reveal an unknown truth regarding our history. I sat down and wrote a column that included Ibn Zerhani and Bottfolio which revealed the facts. What a coward! Immediately, he pulled away from us and joined other factions. There’s some talk about him disguising himself after dark and impersonating his heroes in order to prove the actual existence of his invented personages to his new friends who had even closer ties to young officers. He appeared at the entrance of some Beyoğlu movie theater one night, dressed either as the Messiah or Mehmet the Conqueror, sermonizing at the surprised crowd waiting to see the movie about how the whole nation needed to take on other guises and lead other lives: seeing how American films had become just as hopeless as our domestic films, we no longer had half a chance getting anywhere imitating them. Apparently, he attempted to turn the movie crowd against the movie producers on Yeşilçam Street, trying to get them to follow his lead. It was not only the ‘miserable petite bourgeoisie’ he often brought up in his columns, who lived in rundown wood-frame houses in the slums and on muddy Istanbul streets, but back in those days too, it was the whole Turkish nation that was waiting for, just as they do today, a ‘savior.’ They believed with all their usual sincerity and optimism that if a military coup took place, bread would get cheaper; if sinners were put to torture, then the doors to Paradise would be opened. But thanks to Mister Jelal’s passion and greed for keeping people in his thrall, factions of coup planners got into scraps with each other; the military coup was off; tanks that were mobilized that night didn’t roll up to the radio station but beat it back to the barracks. Conclusion: You can see for yourself that we are still being driven from pillar to post. Shamed by the Europeans, we manage to cast a few votes now and then, so that we can tell visiting foreign newsmen with impunity that we are just like them now. But it doesn’t mean we have no hope for salvation, either. We do have a way out. If British TV had wished to talk to me instead of to this Jelal of yours, I could have told them the secret of how the East can remain itself quite felicitously for tens of thousands of years yet. Mister Galip, my son, your cousin Jelal is a pitiful, defective human being. In order to be ourselves, we don’t need to stock our closets, as he does, with wigs, fake beards, historical costumes, and strange outfits. Mahmut the First went around in disguise every evening, but guess what he put on? Instead of his sultan’s turban, he wore a fez, and he carried a walking stick. That’s it! There is no necessity to put on all that makeup for hours every night, getting into strange, gaudy costumes or tattered beggar’s rags. Our world is a whole in itself, not a world where things fall apart. Within this realm, there exists another realm, but this is not a world that’s concealed behind appearances and stage sets, as in the Western world; so there’s no need to pull away the covers to behold victoriously the hidden truth. Our modest universe is everywhere, it has no center, it’s not on the maps. But that
is
our mystery, given that comprehending it is so extremely difficult. It requires an ordeal. I ask you, how many of our guys with true grit know that you yourself are the whole universe whose mystery you are seeking? And that the whole universe is yourself who is seeking the mystery? Only when you achieve this enlightenment do you deserve to disguise yourself and become someone else. Your Uncle Jelal and I share only one emotion: Like him I too pity our poor movie stars who can neither be themselves nor anyone else. What’s worse, I pity our nation that identifies with these stars! This nation could’ve been saved, even the entire East could have. But your uncle, your uncle’s son Jelal, sold us out for his own gain. Now, freaked out by his own handiwork, he’s hiding from the whole nation, him with his weird wardrobe. Why is he hiding out?”